LIGO and Virgo Announce Another Binary Black Hole Merger, LIGO's 5th

"Scientists searching for gravitational waves have confirmed yet another detection from their fruitful observing run earlier this year. Dubbed GW170608, the latest discovery was produced by the merger of two relatively light black holes, 7 and 12 times the mass of the sun, at a distance of about a billion light-years from Earth. The merger left behind a final black hole 18 times the mass of the sun, meaning that energy equivalent to about 1 solar mass was emitted as gravitational waves during the collision.

This event, detected by the two NSF-supported LIGO detectors at 02:01:16 UTC on June 8, 2017 (or 10:01:16 pm on June 7 in US Eastern Daylight time), was actually the second binary black hole merger observed during LIGO’s second observation run since being upgraded in a program called Advanced LIGO. But its announcement was delayed due to the time required to understand two other discoveries: a LIGO-Virgo three-detector observation of gravitational waves from another binary black hole merger (GW170814) on August 14, and the first-ever detection of a binary neutron star merger (GW170817) in light and gravitational waves on August 17.

LIGO Laboratory is the U.S. national facility for gravitational-wave research. The first detections of gravitational waves by LIGO in 2015 haveopened the field of gravitational-wave physics and astronomy. Funded by the National Science Foundation, LIGO Laboratory's mission is to observe gravitational-wave sources, to operate the LIGO Hanford and Livingston Observatories in support of national and international scientific community,to carry out research and development for future gravitational-wave detectors, and to carry out scientific education and public outreach related to gravitational wave astronomy.